[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: Wed Jun 14 09:28:31 CDT 2006
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] value of PIII PC servers

>My plans may have changed a bit.  I got a U2 with 1GB RAM and 2 300MHz
>CPUs for $40 today.  Will cost $40 to ship it, but I can live with that.
>Shipping always you.

That is a pretty good deal - makes me think my U2s are approaching $0 in value...

>I still need to put the PC server together, but this might take some of
>the immediate pressure off, as long as the U2 will handle WWW and
>database work well enough.

I suspect this is out of your price range, but I found (what I think) is a pretty good deal on eBay - a dual Opteron 246 system (two 2 GHz CPU cores) on a Tyan MB w/1 Gig RAM in a Supermicro workstation case with 4 SATA hotswap trays for $759 + $20 S/H. I'm not familiar with Opterons in any meaningful way, but this seems like a decent deal, since:

CPUs look to be about $175/each
MB is about $225
Case is about $225
4x 256 Meg RAM is about $80-100 for the set of four
and shipping for all the bits elsewhere would be around $100 more, making the do it yourself cost about $900-1,000 (retail). Cheaper builds are availabe from the same seller (dual 242 Operons are $649 + $75 S/H and dual 244 Opterons are $699 + $75 S/H) - ebay link:

http://cgi.ebay.com/AMD-Opteron-246-SATA-150-Barebone-Server_W0QQitemZ6859474047QQcategoryZ80142QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

or item number 6859474047

I need to build up a reasonably beefy Linux server for a project I'm just starting, it's going to be built on an Ubuntu 6.0.6 "LAMP Server" installation...